Praying to a sovereign God

One of the things us Reformed folks major in is the sovereignty of God. The truth that "God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass" (WCF III:1) is both a great comfort to us, and a humbling reminder of our place in God's universe. However, if we don't keep things in balance we can find ourselves using this doctrine as a cop out. For example, if God has foreordained whatsoever shall come to pass, why should we pray? Isn't God just going to do whatever he wants? And yet, we are commanded all throughout the Bible to pray. Why would God, the ultimate "First Cause," who knows the end from the beginning, command us to pray?

Consider these two questions, seemingly in opposition to the other:

1. If God has foreordained everything already, how can we pray in hopes of changing things?
2. If we are commanded to pray, then how can it be true that God is sovereign and has ordained all that comes to pass?

Peter Leithart examines this apparent paradox:

How can God respond to prayers, and yet not have a "real" (ie, a reciprocal, dependent) relation with the creation?

Perhaps there's a Trinitarian answer to this: In the creation, God responds to His own work. He makes light, and then He pronounces His work very good. This is not a matter of God patting Himself on the back. Rather, it is arguably the Father approving the work of His Word and Spirit, the two "hands" by which the Father works in the creation.

God's response to prayer is similar: The Spirit provokes our prayers, which we offer in the name of Jesus to the Father. When the Father responds to these Spirit-inspired prayers, He is responding to His own work. God is responding to God's work, the Father to the Spirit.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism gives a good definition of prayer (#98): "Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with the confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies." Leaving confession and thanksgiving aside for the time being, let's consider how it is that we are to "offer up our desires unto God."

First, let us not be so arrogant as to assume that God's eternal decrees were somehow dependent upon or determined by our foreseen prayers. Romans 11:33-36 makes it clear that God consults nobody but himself. We also know that God is eternally immutable (i.e. unchanging), and that he does not "change his mind" (Numbers 23:19, 1 Samuel 15:29, Psalm 110:4, Jeremiah 4:28). When we pray, even when presenting our requests before God, we should not seek to offer God advice on how he might best provide for us, nor should we attempt to persuade God, that he might somehow be manipulated to follow our orders.

Furthermore, we need to abandon the idea that prayer is merely something that we independently offer up to God, as if we somehow conjure up both the desire to pray and the substance of our prayers from some deep well within ourselves. Natural man has no desire to honor the Lord by offering his supplication, nor does he think to give thanks to God for all that he has already received (Romans 1:21). Even the desire to pray is the result of God's sovereignly bestowed grace. As A.W. Pink said, "The God who has determined to grant a blessing also gives a spirit of supplication which first seeks the blessing." Jonathan Edwards would add, "When the people of God are stirred up to prayer, it is the effect of His intention to show mercy." Finally, as the Puritans were fond of saying, "Prayer is the forerunner of blessing."

Rather than seeing divine sovereignty as a hindrance to prayer, if we think rightly about this lofty doctrine we will see that it is, in fact, akin to rocket fuel for our prayer life! Alva McClain said it this way: "The doctrine of divine sovereignty should be an incentive to pray, for the only kind of a God who can answer prayer is a sovereign God." If God were such that he stood idly by, waiting for an opportunity to act provided by the prayers of his people, I fear he would get little done in a day. Rather, when we pray, we are the ones who are responding to God, not the other way around.

This all gets back to Leithart's trinitarian insight into prayer. Our prayers are prompted by the Holy Spirit, offered in the name of Jesus Christ, and directed toward and answered by the Father. As such, even our most spontaneous prayers (from our perspective) have been providentially decreed from before the foundations of the Earth. God does many things irrespective of prayer (e.g. who prayed that the universe would be created?), and yet he has ordained that some things would come to pass through the persistent prayers of his saints. We can also be confident that God's "yes" and "no" answers are according to his definite and wonderful plan, established in eternity past. This is one of the reasons that we should pray, as Jesus did (Matthew 26:39), that God's will would be done, and not ours. When we pray in a spirit of submission to the will of God, we are prepared to see his direct and immediate answer to our prayers, but also to wait patiently on Him who loves us more than we could know and has promised to provide for us according to his wisdom, not ours.